I think we can resolve this all pretty quickly, I hope.
I see three potential candidates for our license:
1) The BSD/Apache license.
http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html
2) The Mozilla Public License 1.1
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL
3) The GNU Public License 2.0
http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.html
These are actually in order of least to most restrictive. The BSD
license basically says little more than "we retain copyright and do
whatever you want with it". It does not actually contain any
significant restrictions on modification or redistribution of the
covered code.
Both the MPL and GPL require source code to continue to be made
available and that source code of modifications made to be available
to end users. The major difference is that the GPL does not allow
inclusion of the code in other systems which are not entirely released
under an open source license. In other words, the GPL requires that
any system that derives from GPLed software must allow an end-user
free access to its entire source code (i.e. it must essentially be
GPLed itself). The MPL merely requires that the MPL-licensed package
itself and not necessarily other derived code be redistributed with
source code including any modifications that the distributor has made.
Now, as regarding patents. The GPL effectively tries to limit the
consequences of patent claims against GPLed software by disallowing
redistribution of software found to have been in conflict with the
licensing obligations of a software patent. The MPL goes somewhat
further and actually asserts that both the original owner of the code
and all contributors explicitly allow royalty-free access to patented
inventions *within the context of using the covered software* simply
by releasing it under the MPL.
Now, for my analysis:
1) No licensing scheme will prevent someone from trying to patent
ideas that we are trying to develop. The only real defense against
that is public disclosure of *all* of the ideas, implementation
strategies, aggregations of functionality etc. that we are
pursuing. In patent terms, we want to produce a complete record
that would be usable within a prior art database.
2) The most important way in which the OHS can win is via ubiquity.
What we really want is for our technologies to become as widespread
as possible. I would argue that this cannot happen as long as it
is not possible to use our work in commercial software, and by this
I mean Microsoft Word, AppleWorks, Rational Rose etc. This, I
would say, leaves the GPL out since it basically dictates a
business model for software distribution.
3) The concern over hijacking is *not* addressed by the BSD/Apache
licenses, and Brian Behlendorf has essentially argued that the
protection is more of a community and practicality issue than
anything. While I buy that up to a point (it is kind of stupid to
adopt an open source component and then proprietarize it and thus
lose many of the benefits its being open source), I believe that
argument doesn't reflect the potential for abuse by companies which
can out-scale the open source community by virtue of their sheer
size and market penetration (here I'm talking Microsoft and Oracle
here as examples).
All that said, I particularly like the combination of the MPL and GPL
strategy. By licensing under both and allowing the potential adopter
of you technology the option of choosing which one to live by, you can
have the strengths of both without the downside of either. Commercial
developers have the opportunity to adopt without the free license to
corrupt (as per the MPL) while truly altruistic developers can
aggregate with their own GPLed components and hope for the viruslike
consequences down the line.
Moreover, the possibilty for this aggregation is explicitly recognized
by the Mozilla family (see http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/)
and probably makes it easier for us to inject ourselves into that
community as well.
Well?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lee Iverson SRI International
leei@ai.sri.com 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park CA 94025
http://www.ai.sri.com/~leei/ (650) 859-3307
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